Overview

StarCraft 2: Origins

Table of Contents

Update 2 (11/8/16): Project has been indefinitely postponed due to development difficulties.

About:

Origins is a zerg campaign and prequel to StarCraft 1 played from the perspective of Senior Cerebrate Daggoth, the Overmind's right hand and greatest Cerebrate. It features a focus on accurate voice acting replicating the feel of StarCraft 1, high quality terrain, a new early Zerg tech tree, and expanding the other underdeveloped characters in the swarm. Fourteen missions are currently planned.

Origins is currently in the alpha state and is an experimental campaign due to its lack of human characters and focus on environmental challenges over that of AI. Many features are planned, but their inclusion and even status of the project is contingent on my time, resources and overall reception of the project.

Download:

Origins can be downloaded here. Launch "OriginsLauncher.sc2map" from your editor.

Story:

Origins is one of the few stories featuring a totally alien cast, the Overmind, Daggoth, Nargil, Gorn, and Abathur. It begins from the creation of the Zerg on Zerus, and goes into their expansion into the galaxy, assimilating new creatures and visiting other worlds in their search for life, and ultimately, the Protoss. Origins will cater to lovers of sci-fi, and aims to focus on concepts in physics and evolutionary biology. The story aims to be minimalistic and starts off slow. Retcons from StarCraft 2 are largely ignored.

Gameplay:

Origins features three difficulty levels.

Casual - Minimal focus on macro and reduced AI waves. An easy way to simply enjoy the story.

Brutal - AI waves are stronger and experienced StarCraft players will be challenged.

In many missions, the environment will be more challenging than the AI. This is to reinforce the theme of exploration and the evolutionary forces that forged the zerg into the greatest threat of the Milky Way galaxy.

I've been in the StarCraft modding community for years, and helped work on Origins, Subjection and Mass Recall. Donations will not only benefit the Origins campaign, but my assets will be available to the entire modding community.

I tried to play it again, but it says the map uses dependencies which are no longer available. I think you need to change the dependencies to LotV, I really need to get some screenshots of the termite and hornet.

Waves don't get more difficult as the mission progresses (even as you get 3/3 ups), and unlimited time means you can build up a huge army.

Queens are just overpowered, being able to spawn broodlings on every non-flying unit. Worms in your base? 1-shot kill! AoE anti-swarm whatever it's called? 1-shot kill!! I strongly recommend not having broodlings usable on large units.

Not being able to move your buff leads to some issues if you accidentally put it on an overlord. A 350hp slow-moving thing is hard to kill early game, which is when it is needed the most.

(Minor things)

Do not understand why you are given hornets so late as by that time you should have a large number of 3/3 termites to be anti-air.

You're probably given too many minerals I beat the mission on 1-base econ.

Mission 2:

Yes, this mission is hard, but with a heavy macro+research opening (hatch/lair/double spire/ovie upgrades/Hatch 3/burrow/Hive/Hatch 4) (Burrow prevents worker harassment if anyone's looking for tips) then transition into hornets (leaving some room for generator-killing mantalisks) you should be able to beat this.

It feels less of a attack mission, and more of a survive until you get 80 hornets, then win.

It has a lot of cool custom units, and again there's the idea that you can't counter everything with 1 unit (the cloaked ships kill mantas easily while the rift ships annihilate locusts and scourges, under the protection of the rip-fields which kill (larva-spawned) scourges.

Shame it's limited to 2 units with all this cool tech you got in mission 1.

Mission 3:

While queens are still very powerful, the amount of splash damage units means that you cannot possibly hit them all in time with broodlings. That+morph time/mission time limits the OPness of them a bit.

You can play really greedy with macro since that there's no attack waves at all.

The timer/1-base limit makes it hard to consider going for high cost/lair+ tech units

Sometimes it can be hard to see the spores when they are in structures.

Yes, the descriptions that mention zerglings and drones were taken directly from SCMR, which in turn were taken from SC1's manual. I assume these will be corrected in later versions, just like the portraits.

I just played the 3 campaign mission that are currently released.
Overall I Loved the story, the doodads and I am amazed by the custom units (they are sooo cool!)
I think it feels like a blizzard-made SC1 prequel.

Now here are some glitches and other things I found to be improved:

Mission 1:
The Unit that the Nydus canal comes from has the tiniest health bar that i have ever seen, It is very hard to see how much health is left, but you can see the color change.

Now In the description of some structures/units it says 'drone' instead of harvester. These are the structures/units: Extractor, larva, lair. it also says zerglings in the description of the spawning pool.

The zerusion walkers's portrait have two the crab beetle and dahaka, not portrait, just dahaka, the unit, or the story mode one.

The lava surge screen vibration only happens about %33 of the time, this could of me just not noticing it.

When building some structures the cliffs and lava went black, not all of them (I think) just some of them. This happened with the queen's nest and nydus canal, and possibly others.

The Aerie (at least when building) has the behavior of being able to build a mutalisks and calls the stricture a spire.

My game sometimes froze for about 10 secs every so often when the behemoths appeared.

Mission 2:
The turrets (can not remember the name) that were originally a doodad that was on the WoL worldship does not turn to attack it's target, so all of them face one direction, their green crystals are fluro green, so too green.

Mission 3:
The poison sacs tip does not finish, it just says "...transition from green to".

There is no black fog, so you can see all of the terrain and doodads, but no units (exp for the highlighted areas).

Is Daggoth supposed to be at the main base? Well he is anyway.

Well that's it, I hope the feedback was helpful, just so you know i played on minimal graphics (with 3D portraits on) and on overlord mode.
I am really exited about the next missions coming out, and on SC2 Master I think you should change the development stage from planning to alpha.

A Zerg campaign about the early days of the Swarm? That's something I've wanted to play for a long time, so I fully support your initiative. The concept of your campaign sounds very promising, especially if you really are going to expand on some scientific ideas. :)

Gameplay-wise, the campaign felt a bit uneven. The first two missions are very protracted, while the third one is very short in comparison, more like a typical SC2 mission. The Daggoth difficulty is challenging, roughly corresponding to the Hard difficulty in LotV (that three-in-one attack wave in mission 2 was positively brutal, though). But overall, the focus on environmental hazards is a nice idea.

The characters' voices sounded a bit bland to my taste (no idea if it's the acting or the effects). But then again, I don't really have anything to suggest here.

been playing through this for a while so far, currently stuck on mission 2.
I'm about to say something scathing on it so before I do I'm also going to say that from what I've played of it so far, Mission 2 is actually my favorite campaign map - EVER - in terms of concept. this felt exactly like what I imagined the zerg vs. Xel'naga battle to go.
That said...

The fact the AI likes to sit and camp mineral lines, the fact you have no time to set up enough to defend early, and the frustratingly low health of the scourge nest has made "Daggoth" difficulty feel rather more frustrating than it needs to be and on levels I don't think help the campaign.
I achieved gold in the competitive and I generally do play zerg, and even after efficiently spending my minerals, trying a bunch of different balances of units to economy focus, I still can't find myself ever getting ahead, and when I think "Xel'naga"... I don't think camping minerals with drones like they're trolling a bronze.
It'd probably be more tolerable if you started with more tech, but at the moment you either need to rely on spore defence that can't move to cover the numerous angles the Xel'naga will try (and which they have no interest in engaging if they can help it), try for termites while still trying to get the larva and minerals to create the 30+ you need to meaningfully engage any of the xel'naga attack waves, or try to tech up while getting hammered by ships from second one.

or to put it more simply, it's just a bit much very fast.

overall, though, Story is absolutely great, gameplay has been fun outside of a few areas, and this already feels far more starcraft than any of the sequel's campaigns in feel, fun, and atmosphere.

if there's any criticism I have for the campaign overall, it's that the game's a bit bad about explaining itself at times - I didn't know I'd obtained spore colonies my first run-through of mission 2, for instance, which hurt me a great deal, and I didn't initially know I needed to inject the scourge nest regularly, either! There's never been any point where I've been outright crippled by lack of knowledge, but there's been a few times I've been left with a limp.

Overall, good work, despite my criticism up there, so far it's 9.5/10. I cannot wait to see more.

I started recording this campaign and my opinions. Also the audio of the game or my voice might cut out or get messed up because I use a laptop and record with OBS: Open Broadcaster Service and my mic will either be the one in my laptop or a mic on my headset.

Godlike accurate voice on the overmind, and also probs to the daggoth voice. With some accent training, you could really get an amazing variety to the different characters in your campaigns.

I have played the SC1 remake campaign, some of the other ones (Subjection and the one with purifiers)

I signed up now to start commenting a bit cuz why not?

I think most users really enjoy playing campaigns similar to that you find in campaign by Blizzard. I understand it is most fun for a mapmaker to explore things themselves, but in SC2: origins I think there is a great balance between sc2-intuitive campaign gameplay and new features, and that is what I really like here, besides the story!

I hope to see more custom campaigns with actual in-game upgrade specializations and tech trees similarily to that you find in the real campaigns, further improved with bonus objective based upgrades and achievements.

I believe the issue is people just clicking download which will grab only the most recent file (the SCMR mod file currently). Anyone looking to download this who is feeling confused, make sure you go to the files tab of this page in order to download both the most recent mod AND map files.

I had a very big performance drop during that 1st mission went from 60fps to 10 when the behemoths are introduced. Unfortunately it was unplayable for me after that. I enjoyed everything leading up to that though. Maybe reduce the amount of hornets swarming around the behemoths?